Shostakovich: Symphonies 4, 5 and 6 album review – Klaus Mäkelä takes on history

Barely nine months after the final release in Deutsche Grammophon’s latest survey of the Shostakovich symphonies (with Andris Nelsons and the Boston orchestra), there looks to be the start of a new cycle on DG’s sibling label in the Universal group. In the sleeve notes for these recordings of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä insists that he was determined to group the three works together for his first Shostakovich recording because the Fourth is the composer’s “ultimate masterpiece”, the Fifth the “most perfect symphony” and the Sixth “has always been my favourite”.
Despite their historical connections, though, the three works have little in common musically. The Fourth is the score that Shostakovich withdrew before its premiere after the official condemnation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, as well as the surviving evidence of the modernist route that his subsequent music did not take. The Fifth was famously his response to that “justified criticism”, and the Sixth is different again, a strange work in three progressively faster movements which began life as a plan to compose a “Lenin symphony”. For Mäkelä its first movement is the “finest single symphonic movement Shostakovich ever wrote”.
Undoubtedly the performances bear out his enthusiasm, at least partly. Sometimes Mäkelä’s approach can seem a little too careful and measured, especially in the opening movement of the Fifth, despite the refinement of the Oslo Philharmonic’s playing, while the sheer wildness of the Fourth always seems to be kept on a tight leash. But the account of the Sixth Symphony is beautifully controlled and paced, the Oslo strings radiant as the first movement steadily intensifies, the woodwind fabulously agile in the scherzo second, and the finale a joyous, witty romp.
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